Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 204

“Turning Gems Into Dirt”

    Up today, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   Book of Moses Insights #23: Enoch, the Prophet and Seer: Enoch’s Prophecy of the Tribes (Moses 7:5–11, 22)   ***   Two recent items from Jeff Lindsay:   “Turning Gems into Dirt: The Case for Adam Clarke as a Source for the “Inspired […]

Revision 5.20 “What the West Owes the East” (A Word Sampler, Part 3)

    But we return to our investigation of words that the West has borrowed from Arabic. Several common items of Western furniture bear Arab names. The “mattress” that we sleep on, for example, was at first merely a matrah, a place where something is “thrown down.” (I suppose, then, that it is perfectly appropriate […]

“Doing science a disservice”

    Back on 21 November 2006, the astoundingly productive Anglo-Irish theologian Alister McGrath delivered a speech in New York City under the perhaps rather cheeky title “The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.”  Armed with Oxford University doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history and — even prior to […]

Religion and Health, With Data from the Sciences

      I’ve often had occasion here and elsewhere to mention the prolific Alister McGrath, an Anglo-Irish theologian who earned his doctorate in divinity from Oxford before earning an Oxford doctorate in intellectual history but after earning an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics.  Between pages 235 and 267 of Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and […]

Revision 5.19 “What the West Owes the East” (A Word Sampler, Part 2, Including Excurses on Chess and the Book of Mormon)

    Changing gears, it is worth noting that many terms connected with warfare have entered our Western languages from the Arabs. (Perhaps this says something of the state of war that has existed between Christendom and the world of Islam through much of their shared his­tory.) Some of these words have amusing histories in […]

Me, the coronavirus, and my fiendish attempt to take away the freedoms of BYU students, staff, and faculty

    I’ve been contacted by two or three people who are incensed at my newly-revealed role in constructing a coercive police state at Brigham Young University.  Here is the article that triggered their indignation:   Enoch Moore, “BYU Censorship: Corona Virus Tyranny on Campus”   If you read down a bit, you’ll find the […]

Joseph Smith, Adam Clarke, and Nauvoo

    Two important reviews appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.   The first is from Richard E. Bennett:   A Uni-Dimensional Picture of a Multi-Faceted Nauvoo Community Review of Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York City: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 336 […]

Some background on Hallowe’en

    We’ve just entered the month of October — the month of Halloween, during which, in America at least, tiny vampires, ballerinas, ghouls, superheroes, goblins, ninjas, and witches typically descend upon us, demanding candy. (One of my granddaughters has announced that she will be a dragon-squirrel, and we’re all eager to find out exactly […]

Revision 5.18 “What the West Owes the East” (A Word Sampler, Part 1)

    Finally, I offer a grab bag of words on various subjects, to illustrate the wide range of things in everyday life that we either absolutely owe to the Arabs or for which we have borrowed words from the Arabic language. I start with something very near and dear to most of us—food. The […]

English “Science” and German “Wissenschaft”

    Back on 8 September 2020, I posted a brief blog entry (“Can the study of history yield genuine knowledge?”) in which, even more briefly, I cited a passage from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., rev., translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 4.  I used that […]